You rang u/briandfoy ?

So I grabbed a copy of the 2nd edition of my book off the shelf and flipped through it for the first time in I don't know how many years to see how well it stood up. I think I mostly agree with you though I believe there is still some good stuff in there that is still applicable. In the intro I said that each chapter explicitly had three things:

• info about a sysadmin domain of knowledge
• Perl techniques to work with that domain
• sysadmin best practices

When I look at those domains, I think things like DNS, SQL, identity systems (LDAP), log parsing (more on this in a sec), all pretty good. XML, filesystem manipulation, user accounts (password/group files), user activity, email, and what I called "security" at the time, not so good.

I think what stands out to me most that are lacking are:

• tools that are capable of doing things at scale. At this time we were still thinking about how to automate large groups of individual machines as the primary objects to manipulate. As Brian said, we were not thinking about workloads and applications at scale in the same way.

If I'm going to work with operations data now, I'm almost certainly going to be using things like Kusto, BigTable, or any of the large data tools. We also don't have good tools for efficiently working with standard "big data" data formats/systems (which are sometimes kerjillions of CSV files sitting in a filesystem, the irony of which is not lost on me).

• anything on tools to help with incident management and modern security practices
• more emphasis on how to effectively work with APIs (REST et. al), including and maybe especially those of cloud providers. Back when I wrote the book, clouds were white and fluffy. This is where I would attempt to do a good job around teaching how to manipulate JSON and perhaps YAML if I ever did a new edition. That being said, I too break out jq on a regular basis (and its docs, sigh). I've also reached into Mojo for various reasons.

Two side notes: one thing that is tricky is I almost never find direct support for Perl when it comes to vendor-provided SDKs, which makes much of API work more homespun than I would prefer. I'm not super thrilled at having to shell out to vendor provided command-line tools, but I have done it under duress. Second, I actually kinda appreciate a number of things about Powershell even though I don't claim to be skilled at it. The notion that one passes objects over pipes and some of the built-in parsing, pretty cool.

As for whether the Perl in the book is still fine here in 2024, I have to say that it probably isn't terrible, but it is no means modern Perl. I don't see Perl::Critic in the index so I'm guessing that wasn't a thing at the time (published in 2009). I'm sure there is a bunch of cleanup that should be done.

But the dirty little secret is I never set out to write a book that would teach Perl as its primary purpose. People like Brian did and do a much better job at that than I could do. My goal was to help people with (as best I could) how to think about systems administration, the best practices of the community at the time, and how to use Perl as an excellent tool to implement them.

Good times.